Dirty White Coat
Mel Herbert, MD, and the creators of EM:RAP, UCMAX, CorePendium, and the collaborators on "The Pitt" and many of the most influential medical education series present a new free podcast: “Dirty White Coat.” Join us twice a month as we dive into all things medicine—from AI to venture capital, long COVID to ketamine, RFK Jr. to Ozempic, and so much more. Created by doctors for clinicians of all levels and anyone interested in medicine, this show delivers expert insights, engaging discussions, and the humor we all desperately need more of!
Dirty White Coat
Burnout and Coaching with Scott Weingart
Link to scott course: https://guidewirecoaching.com/unburnable/
Scott Weingart shares his experiences developing physician executive coaching to help emergency physicians find meaning and purpose despite a broken healthcare system.
• Burnout often stems from negative inner voice rather than external circumstances
• Cognitive distancing helps physicians separate themselves from unhelpful thoughts
• Stoic acceptance allows doctors to focus energy on what they can control
• Nonviolent communication techniques transform interactions with difficult consultants
• Maintaining fundamentals during shifts (eating, drinking, bathroom breaks) is essential
• Optimal performance pace prioritizes patient safety and career longevity
• Sleep optimization receives special focus, with warnings about alcohol and caffeine
• Lifelong learning reignites the curiosity and satisfaction many found in residency
• Executive coaching costs approximately $3,000 for twelve sessions over 24 weeks
• Regular meditation practice can be transformative for emergency physicians
• Every emergency physician should consider therapy from the beginning of their career
Call us or visit our website to learn more about physician executive coaching and register for upcoming sessions.
now I have my audio mal, but I don't have a clean copy of your audio.
Speaker 3:Okay, good, all right and then, of course, ladies and germs, is scott weart. Now Scott is one of the most famous emergency physicians critical care people in the world. But he's not just a doc. He is now doing some coaching. He is now helping docs with burnout with Rob Orman, and I got him on the phone here and talked to him about what are they doing, what are some of the principles, because this really means a lot to me right now. Are they doing? What are some of the principles, because this really means a lot to me right now. What can we do? Really do more than the yoga pants for a group of clinicians that are really suffering? So this is not a CME piece. Scott is the owner of a company that does this with Rob, so just understand that. But I think there's so much useful information here you should hear it and then you should act on it. So on the coat that is quite filthy here is Scott Weingart.
Speaker 3:Maybe, I'll throw this on Invictus as well. What the heck.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I started doing physician executive coaching like five years ago and it was just to be for high performers, people already at the top of their game, helping them get that 1% more. And that was fine, that was fun. But then people started coming and saying could you coach me, cause I'm miserable in emergency medicine and I'm like how is that possible?
Speaker 2:It's the best job in the world. And I started taking on a few of these clients and they really were not happy with their lives and they weren't being abused. You know the system's totally broken. You know that, mel. But when they described their job it was like just like everyone else's job, you know it had its ups and downs, but at the heart of it it was fundamentally an amazing job. And yet people were miserable and I started thinking, well, why is this? And so I started working with burnout clients, started putting together a mental model of how this was working, why it was ramifying on these physicians the way it was. And then I got together with my professional coaching partner, a man you know very well, rob Orman, and we decided to go from individual coaching to group coaching. And we've run through probably like 200 doctors at this point through this group coaching model. And it was even more potent because now they were talking to each other and saying it's not any better in my neck of the woods.
Speaker 2:You're not going to, by changing jobs, escape all the things that you're dealing with and what people come to the realization of is that it's really an issue of mindset and fundamentals, and not an issue of which job they're working at. For the most part, now, there's abusive jobs out there. I don't want to pretend that people aren't having true misery in the field, and if that's the case, then they got to switch, but most of the time the grass is not greener. It's just a question of having lost a meaning and purpose and not going about things in a way that's setting you up for long-term life. In emergency medicine, people are very much using short-term strategies.
Speaker 3:Oh, and I should just be clear that I have nothing to do with their company. No kickbacks, nothing. Because they are going to talk or I'm going to talk a lot about what they're doing. So just for the records. So I said to Scott this sounds like horseshit, this sounds like you're dreaming, because the system is so broken. You're being asked to do more with less, doing rectal exams in waiting rooms, and just it's so bad. How can you make this better? What's your magic? Because it doesn't seem like a change in mindset. It's really going to help. So I'm going to call bullshit on Scott Weingart right up the front.
Speaker 2:They're absolutely right. There are enormous system issues, but they can absolutely work around that system and still find the things that are meaningful and important in the job. They just have to change one, the way they think about it. And two, to your point, they have to change whether or not they're going to take the burdens that the system is trying to place on them and actually accept them and now try to strive to achieve them, or they're going to play around the system and get back to the things they care about.
Speaker 3:So, scott, you don't have to reveal all the special sauce of what you do, but tell us some of the key things that you're doing in this new line of business. And the reason that this is not a back and forth is because I screwed up the timing and I was on my phone, so I cut that audio out and I'm VOing it right here for you.
Speaker 2:No, I'll tell you all the special sauce. I got no problem with it, just revealing it all. And it's not rose colored glasses. If we were telling people, oh no, you have a great job, just go back to it and just realize how good it is, then people would obviously not have any benefit from it at all and they'd probably you know, pillory us. No, well, I'll tell you the sequence, mel, and then you tell me if any of it's of any interest. To go into more depth, the first thing we deal with is inner voice, and this is the fundamental foundation of the course, because this is the realization that docs come to when they work in this coaching format that a lot of their misery comes from their own brain, their thoughts, the negativity, the this sucks, the.
Speaker 2:I can't take it anymore. If I have one more psych patient that should be upstairs, come in, I'm just going to lose it. And they have this litany, this constant stream of negative vocalization that people don't realize is not them, don't realize is not them. It is a separate set of pieces of your brain. It was very well built to keep us alive, you know, 8,000 years ago. It's not well suited to our current time, but this constant negative litany is actually fused with the core identity of the docs, and so they are having, in essence, a demon on their back whispering in their ear this constant stream of negativity that they think is them. And so this inner voice.
Speaker 2:We explain what's going on and we start working on techniques of cognitive distancing, which is just a fancy way of saying you are not your thoughts, you are not your feelings. Those thoughts and feelings are going to pop up into your awareness and then it's up to you to decide whether you want to listen to them or not. Now, if you had a drunken friend, it's a buddy, it's someone you care about, it's someone you've known for years, and they're telling you how to solve your life. There's an excellent chance you're going to be very kind to them because it's a buddy, but you're not going to really listen to their advice. Does that sound like it resonates with you?
Speaker 3:No, absolutely not. I'll do exactly what they say. Yeah, that resonates. Okay, keep going.
Speaker 2:So that's how we want you to start treating these thoughts that pop up. This litany of negativity is as if they're coming from a drunken buddy. So you're kind, you say oh, thank you. And then you evaluate all right, is this helpful to me? Right, like the thoughts of I should probably just burn this ED down, right, if I have to deal with one more shift of this, if they put that triage nurse on, that's it, I'm just walking out. That's probably not helpful to you.
Speaker 2:So we teach how to separate out those thoughts and ask yourself you know, have a moment of awareness that they're there and ask yourself okay, is this helping me or not? And if it is great, you could act on them, you could use them, you could put them in a place where they're being given prominence. And if they're not helpful, if they're just making your day worse, then you thank your brain. You say thank you, brain, for bringing that up. But I'm going to go a different direction right now. And it seems stupid. Every single person we tell it to they're like that's ridiculous, I'm not going to do that. And we tell them up front it's going to seem stupid. And it starts to work. And it starts to work not just in the work setting, it starts to work in your home setting, because that's really where burnout lives is. You have tension at work. You perceive it as stress, you perceive it as threat and you know that just makes the shifts a little tougher at first. But then you start bringing it home and now, all of a sudden, your loved ones are not liking you too much and that breeds discontent. You stop doing the fundamentals at home and then all of a sudden you know all the misery of your job has come to roost in the environment that's supposed to be restorative, rejuvenating, and that's where burnout really sets in. So we need the inner voice recognized at home and at work and we need to distance ourselves and we need to actually ask ourselves is this helpful or not? So that's the start. That would be.
Speaker 2:Session one is inner voice work. No-transcript. Then don't worry about it, let it fade away, let it be less prominent in your thoughts. So if you come in and the entire waiting room is full and you have, you know, no space and you look at the residents and they're you know the crew that you're like this is going to be a really tough shift and you're like start spending five, 10 minutes just locked on to how horrible the shift's going to be. It's going to affect the entire tenor of your time. If you say, all right, well, this is what I got to work with, let's get to it, then that's going to be a different mindset. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:Mel. This reminds me of the serenity prayer that I think we're all pretty aware of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly the one. And the serenity prayer was based wholly on stoicism, which is where this comes from. Right, god, grant me the serenity to change those things I can, to accept those things I can't, and the wisdom to tell the difference between the two. That's it exactly, and that's acceptance. We'd love the docks to go one step further, and Nietzsche coined it as amor fati love your fate which is, instead of just accepting it, we'd love them to get there. That's already going to make a huge difference, but it would be even better if they could apply amor fati, which is all right. So waiting room is totally full. I'm going to be operating with just two beds the entire time, because the rest are filled with borders. All right, what job can I do with just those two beds? How can I make this like absolutely the best possible situation with those two beds? Let's do it. You look at which surgeons are on and it's just the meanest, most horrible surgeons in the hospital. All right, beautiful.
Speaker 2:This is now a challenge. When I interact with them, I'm going to make them smile in the course of my interaction. That's my game I'm going to play. It's called the stoic challenge, right, I'm going to challenge myself to actually have them laughing in my interactions with them. May succeed, may not, but it's going to be fun, because now it's actually a training exercise, you know. So that mindset shift, it seems minimal, it changes your entire demeanor. Everything is the lens you're looking through when you perceive your situation and we don't realize that that lens, that negative lens, is fused to our face when we're in the midst of burnout, and so we have to take off those glasses for a second, find that we can have fun with the situation.
Speaker 3:This all sounds like a bit of a mind trick and not too long ago I would have said you're out of your mind, you can't control this stuff, it just happens. But in my journey I've realized that is actually not true. But it's sort of like being a monk it requires work and exercise and it's really a muscle. And I know that many of you are very skeptical still. But let's go on.
Speaker 2:All right. Next we do communication and it's an entire walk through a technique called nonviolent communication, and I can't go into it here, mel, because it would take the entirety. I mean, maybe that's an entire different discussion. But we teach people how to communicate nonviolently because we are exposed to violent communication constantly from the people around us, from the patients, and we actually put it out there to the world. We communicate violently, not violently in the sense of like raising our fists, violently in the sense of trying to exert our will onto others. And once we start talking about it, we realize how often we are interacting with staff, with patients, with ourselves. We speak to ourselves with violent inner voice. So we walk people through how to go about being nonviolent with communication.
Speaker 2:And then that leads into the next segment, which is dealing with a difficult consultant, because when we did surveys we found this was a big source of misery in emergency medicine. It's just we're at the whims of these children who have been given the imprimatur of, you know, top-notch positions in the hospital and now we have to deal with the fact that they have an advanced past-toddler stage. Well, we've walked through techniques to actually do that in a way that's not just safe for us not just safe for our patient and gets them what they need, but also potentially could be, like I mentioned before, viewed as a communication challenge that we now are going to see if we could live up to or not, and it becomes kind of a game.
Speaker 3:For me, this is one of the most difficult things during my practicing career. Yes, like you, I have the images of the dead and dying children that are really hard to get out of your head decades later. I have that. I have it bad, but on the day-to-day, the thing that really stressed me was having to talk to all surgeons and consultants that would just talk down to you, didn't know as much as you did and just made your life miserable.
Speaker 2:Mel, you have a kindred spirit. I mean, dealing with surgeons was the bane of my existence and it made me absolutely miserable. Mel, you have a kindred spirit. I mean, dealing with surgeons was the bane of my existence and I just. It made me absolutely miserable. In fact, it was one of the only things in emergency medicine that made me miserable is just dealing with these people who had never learned how to communicate with other human beings. But there are ways, and that nonviolent communication just changes the game.
Speaker 3:That is not to say that all surgeons are the same. I've worked with some incredible surgeons, like Kenji Inaba, for example. You could not find a nicer human being and a better surgeon and somebody that you wanted to pick up the phone when you needed help. Always professional, always so nice, and actually that makes it worse because, like, this is how we could talk to each other. Wouldn't that be awesome if we did that all the time?
Speaker 2:we then, uh, we moved to shift efficiency and now this. You know, we go from the very theoretical mindset stuff to what really you could sink your teeth into and the first thing we teach is what I call the fundies, the fundamentals, which is you're on shift, you're going to eat when you need to eat. You're going to drink when you're thirsty. Shift, you're going to eat when you need to eat. You're going to drink when you're thirsty. You're probably going to be drinking when you're not thirsty because your thirst response lags behind. Every time you need to urinate.
Speaker 2:Unless you have a critically ill patient, you're going to go and do it. You're going to, when you make phone calls, go out onto the ambulance bay ramp and look at the sky, whether it's nighttime or daytime, and then your pace is not going to be motivated by how full the waiting room is. Your pace is going to be motivated by what has you in optimal performance for the safety of your patients and your longevity. And obviously, if sick patients come in, then you got to up your game and change your pace. But if they're not critically ill patients, then you go at a pace that allows you to work safely and most potently for your patients and your career longevity.
Speaker 3:Now this is a really, really hard one as well, because we have basically told residents if you're a good resident, you are going to look in the waiting room, see how busy it is and go as fast as you can to make the waiting times as short as possible, and we just pounded into each other's heads that that's what you have to do. But now we find ourselves in a situation where we can't we can't clear the waiting room, we can't get it all done, we can't do it ourselves, we just can't do it, and people are driving themselves crazy trying to do it. But again, this mindset that I've been responsible for as well, that this is what you are If you're a real doctor, if you're a real ER doc, you can go at full speed all the time, no problem, and the truth is particularly in this environment. You cannot You've put your finger on it, mel problem. And the truth is particularly in this environment you cannot.
Speaker 2:You've put your finger on it, mel. What you've said is embodying the voice of so many of the doctors that come to us, and even the ones that don't say it consciously. That's their subconscious feeling, because it was beaten into all of us by our chief residents and our attendings when we were training is what the hell are you doing sitting there? You know, drinking some water, there's patients to be seen? Get your ass off the chair. And we started just bringing that into our core, and, as a result, now we're the ones doing it to ourselves.
Speaker 2:And I'm not saying sandbag, I'm not saying go slow. I'm not saying make patients wait unnecessarily. I'm saying that I know that I have a level of performance that leads me to be making good decisions for my patients and leaves me with some gas in the tank for when a sick patient does show up, and that's the optimal place. Now we'll have attendings come in who are at the very bottom of their pack in terms of efficiency, and telling them to slow down more is going to be deleterious to their job security. So, then, what we have to do and we usually have to work with them separately, not in the group is we have to increase their efficiency, because almost all of those doctors are upping their pace, but they're spinning their wheels. They're not actually moving very quickly, but they just are doing it frantically.
Speaker 2:And instead we want to teach them charting techniques, we want to teach them flow techniques and we want to teach them ways of getting to the middle of the pack. And once you're at the middle of the pack, then you pick your optimal pace and the only time you change it is when patients are dying, not when patients are waiting. And we have to accept this as a group in emergency medicine, because then we could start breaking the perpetuation of this idea that we're superhuman. You'll be able to do that for a year or two. You'll be miserable, you'll be burnt out, but that's not the way to make it to a 20 or 30-year career in emergency medicine. The optimal pace is the one that allows you to be running as if you're a marathoner, not a sprinter.
Speaker 3:I know that many of you are feeling very uncomfortable about that. This is such a part of who we think we are and what we should be doing and I've got to say I think it's wrong. I think Scott's right here. We can't take on all this burden ourselves. We can't empty the waiting room. We need to get some resources. We need to go at a pace that we can sustain, not for a shift, not for a week of shifts, but for a lifetime of shifts.
Speaker 2:We do some life management stuff on how to manage calendars, to-do lists, hiring people to do non-essential tasks, actually reserving time for your family, for your partner, and locking it in, having that ironclad on the schedule. The same way you have your shifts. I'm not going to go into that any further because it just you know, everyone knows it, they just don't do it, so we teach them good methods for that. Then the next one is we talked about work fundamentals, what to do on shift, eating, drinking, peeing, et cetera. Then we talk about the fundamentals at home and these get ignored as people get burnt out, because the nice thing to do if you're starting to feel burnout would be to do all of these restorative things. But instead what you do is you drink beer, you watch Netflix for five hours and you don't sleep, and then you wonder why the burnout is perpetuating at home. So we teach movement, light exposure, nutrition, meditation, optimizing restorative relationship, time, nature, flow and mindfulness practices and play and laughter, and then the one that we spend the lion's share of the time like 90% of the time on, is sleep, and we talk about sleep from the perspective of restorative sleep when you're on a regular shift schedule.
Speaker 2:And then we deal with circadian disruption from night shifts. Which is the real bugbear of emergency medicine is this circadian disruption. So sleep gets big primetime billing. Because when you look at the sleep habits of emergency medicine they're horrible and their caffeine intake just destroys their capability of deep, restorative sleep.
Speaker 2:And then we talk about alcohol Mel. Talk about alcohol Mel. And it's really a rude awakening when we show the studies and we discuss the fact that if you're drinking past 5 pm you are really messing up your sleep. And that is a big sea change for emergency medicine. Because there is nothing I love better than working a night shift and then having breakfast, steak, eggs and a few beers and then going to sleep and thinking that I'm falling asleep so easily. But you're just destroying your sleep architecture with alcohol so that people don't like to hear. But when we have them track it because that's what we do for the ones that are doubters we actually have them put on sleep tracking rings and they prove it to themselves every single time that you can't drink at night and have restorative sleep.
Speaker 3:Prove it to themselves every single time that you can't drink at night and have restorative sleep. I've been pretty skeptical of all these sleep tracking things and just strapping yourself up and making yourself more anxious about what's going on. But in this context, to prove to yourself what works and what doesn't work for your good sleep, and that's not just the stuff that you're ingesting but the way you set up your room and then you can check hey, was I getting enough REM sleep and stuff, I think for those very specific purposes that actually might be useful.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, the self-experimentation is huge because we don't ask people to take anything we say on faith. We'll show them the studies. People don't believe the studies when it comes to themselves. If you're a doctor, we know better. We have them do it and say, okay, give me a week where of alcohol at night and then a week without, and show me the numbers. And they don't show them because they're too embarrassed. And then caffeine is just brutal. Even the people that are like, no, I could drink a cup of coffee right before bed, I'm fine. Yeah, I believe you that you'll. You'll fall asleep, but show me the numbers on your deep and REM sleep and then you could decide whether it's great to be drinking caffeine later in the day. But yeah, so we go through an entire unit on sleep.
Speaker 2:Then we move on to lifelong mastery. This is what a lot of the attending level, the consultant level, docs, lose is they loved residency and now they're not really liking their job anymore and they wonder why. And it's like oh, maybe I'm jaded, maybe I'm bored, maybe it's just gotten worse, but no, what it is is during residency, every day they were discovering something new and so they had this innate flow state, this innate purpose for showing up and they lose that. They've kind of gotten to the point where they're not learning new things. But the reason they're not learning new things is not because they're not exposed to it. It's because learning outside of shift primes you to now see and recognize things you didn't perceive.
Speaker 2:And all of a sudden you are learning. So you read a new paper on a new technique for doing the Valsalva maneuver and now all of a sudden that AFib, that's just like yeah, yeah, give them the Deltiazem. Like you're excited, because, like I want to try it. I want to see if this uh revert. What is it? Oh, mel, you probably remember better than me the maneuver where you lift their legs in the air.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right. The revert trial you get them to sit up, blow on, uh, do a bell salver and then lift their legs up and convert a lot more people than this standard ways of fixing an SVT.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there we go. So it was revert, great, lifelong mastery. But we wanted to take a step further, mel. We want them to listen or read, but then actually write it down and fit it into a framework of learning such that because it's so much more potent if you're taking notes and using that to build a tree of knowledge for themselves. So we teach them the ways to do that, the techniques and the best apps and such for that, of the ways to do that, the techniques and the best apps and such for that. And we try to invigorate their learning, because a lot of docs they go to ASEP once every three years and that's their learning and it's not enough, not enough.
Speaker 2:And then the last piece, mel, is we talk about burnout on a systemic level. We talk about what goes into it. I show them the MCRIT burnout model and then we talk about if they are in a position to lobby or actually create system change, what those would be. But that's a very small part, because we go back to the agency piece. The things the docs have immediate agency on is their own behavior and their own mindset. The things they have very little agency on is making these systems changes. So it's not that I don't think they should happen. It's just that to spin our wheels talking about the fact that the hospital should radically shift the way they treat us a lot of times is a big dream.
Speaker 3:Now we have to be careful with this one, because I've heard some very smart people. Actually, one of the residents called Chris Chris, I don't remember your last name at UCLA, we're saying the same thing we should not be blaming doctors for systemic functional problems that are above their pay grade, that they can't do anything about, that. They're asked to do more with less this whole thing. But what I think we're saying here is that we should be trying to do both. The system needs to get better, but if you're going to survive this right now, for however long it takes to fix it, then you're going to have to do some of these tricks, these mind tricks and these really important life hacks in order to get through, and you're also going to have to very much accept that stuff isn't going to change very quickly.
Speaker 3:So it's not that we shouldn't fix these things or it's the doctor's fault. That is not what this is about. This is about the system is broken and if we're going to continue to function in this system, we have to hack it, and that's what this is about hacking ourselves to try and you know survive a broken system. So tell us a bit more about how this functionally works. Uh, do you go up to an ashram and you're there for a month or a year, or do you do it via zoom? How does this work?
Speaker 2:We do. It's 12 sessions is the course and we do that every other week, so it's 24 weeks and that gives people time to talk amongst themselves in group and to really let the stuff sink in. And we at the end of it it's not just listening, because that doesn't do anything. They have to go and experiment and they're given homework and you have to try it out and let us know what worked, what didn't work, in order to be able to adjust for the individuals. And I don't even know what we're charging right now. It's probably somewhere around $3,000 is what the course costs.
Speaker 2:Individual coaching it's expensive and it's going to vary by coach. I used to be charging $500 an hour, now it's $750 an hour. It's a lot of money and anyone who says to me I shouldn't be paying this, I'm not going to do it. I'm like, yeah, I'm with you, man, it's a lot. And the thing we found that is a saving grace is most of the time the hospitals will pay for this out of your CME money. Even though it's not CME, they do consider it a better use of funds than most of the people going to Aruba for those conferences where we know they're not learning anything. But that's what physician executive coaching that's really the ballpark for everyone who's doing it. That's what it's coming out to.
Speaker 3:That's expensive, real expensive. Why is it so expensive?
Speaker 2:I hear it. Yeah, you know I thought they were ridiculous rates at first too, and you know this is all you know self-justification. But I don't know how therapists do it, mel, because they're doing 40 hours a week For me doing you know, a few hours of executive coaching, which is all I could really handle. Each hour takes so much out of me, like I'm pretty much done for the day and maybe a therapist would tell me like you're not supposed to be putting that much of yourself into it, scott, you're supposed to just be kind of oh yeah, yeah, Tell me, tell me more about that. But that's not how it is for, uh, for me or for the people I know. And like, after an hour of doing executive coaching with a physician, I'm like I'm spent because the active listening and the amount of attention you're putting into this, it's just give me an ED shift. That's going to be a lot more relaxing.
Speaker 3:I looked at executive coaching just for the business part of my life and the people who do this who are a bit more famous, they're charging thousands of dollars per hour and I'm just I can't bring myself to pay that. That's ridiculous. So this is not an outrageous number that they're talking about there. Nobody wants to talk about money. It's one of those topics we don't talk about. But it is funny that ER docs in particular will ask each other how much do you make an hour? It's sort of a thing that we just do in a mincemeat. But other people do not talk about this stuff. So in person or via Zoom, because that would raise the expense a lot. It's one thing to go to a conference that's $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000, but then there's the hotel and then there's the plane and all that stuff. That's where it really starts to add up.
Speaker 2:No, it's over Zoom and we were worried like would the group dynamic be there? But I don't know about you, mel, but I've found like I've done meditation over Zoom, I've done therapy work over Zoom and, for whatever reason, I don't think you lose that much. I mean, with the degree of resolution of the cameras now, the capability of seeing people's facial expressions, I just don't feel it's a big loss and in fact now most of my grand rounds are done virtually, because to have that carbon footprint and all of that money being wasted to just go there and speak for an hour, I'd much rather just do it on Zoom in almost every case, and I don't think you lose that much. So, yeah, it's virtual.
Speaker 3:So I'll have to also agree with that. I have found although we got sick of Zoom during the pandemic, the cameras, the mics really have improved so much. I do therapy every week for part of my restoration, trying to get healthy again, and I find that it's fantastic and I don't have to drive and I'm not stressed and I'm not trying to get healthy again and I find that it's fantastic and I don't have to drive and I'm not stressed and I'm not trying to get parking, and you can do a little meditation beforehand and then do the session. I really find that it works just fine. Probably the first few times you want to meet the person and get to know them have a bit of a rapport, but I find that it works just fine. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3:And I got to tell you I just bought this thing called an owl and this is a bit of a side thing and again I have no association with the company but this thing called an owl, which is a array of cameras and microphones that if you're doing groups like you, put it in the middle of the table and it'll pick out who's talking and it will focus the camera on that person and it'll focus the audio on that person and it has been just so good when you've got a group of people in one place and you're emoting in somebody else, so really helpful.
Speaker 3:Anyway, that was an aside, so I was wrapping it up saying you know scott, thanks for the time, and the reason that I'm talking to him about this is because I've known him for 25 years or more. He has been at the top of his game and now he's doing this to help other physicians. I just think that's really important and he's a no bullshit guy. He's absolutely a no bullshit guy and you can go to one of his sessions, no doubt, and call bullshit on him and have the discussion. That's what I really like about Scott.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're so kind, mel and have the discussion. That's what I really like about Scott. Yeah, you're so kind, mel. You know what you just said a minute ago brought up some I forgot like a key session we do, mel, and I can't believe I forgot it because it's one that may be the most important to me and that's we do an entire session on meditation for physicians, and that one is so close to my heart and I think every doctor should have a meditation practice. So when before you said, before therapy, you do meditation, I'm like, oh my God, how did I miss mentioning that? Because it is the game changer, I think, for emergency medicine in particular, to have a meditative practice.
Speaker 3:And then, as we're cleaning up here, I was saying you know I've said on multiple podcasts across the world, cleaning up here. I was saying you know I've said on multiple podcasts across the world, but I think every ER, doc, nurse should have therapy from basically the day they begin. It is such an abnormal job. It is just you need to have a place where you can try and work through those feelings and that emotion and that maybe now I'm thinking we should all have executive coaches. I don't know. What do you think, scott?
Speaker 2:No, I think your suggestion was right, mel. I think every doc should be in therapy. I've heard you say that. It resonated so strongly with me. I think you go to a coach when you have a true issue you want to work through and you know, I think I would reserve it for that. I mean, I'm sure there are coaches out there that would just salivate over having a client that's going to come to them on a regular basis without any true problems. But executive coaching at least as opposed to life coaching, executive coaching really is problem-oriented. So I would think every doc would benefit from having one number or contact information in their back pocket for when something comes up. But I think, in contradistinction to clinical coaching Now that's, that's something very different. That, maybe, is another discussion. But you know Atul Gawande's idea that every doc should have a coach that could come in on a shift and actually watch them perform and give advice and feedback. I'm not doing that yet, but that, I think, would be the true game changer for our specialty in terms of upping performance.
Speaker 3:So thanks to Scott for giving us a bit of the inside scoop of what they do. I'm not suggesting that you go and use Scott and Rob, but I am suggesting that you think about this and maybe there's somebody in your area or check them out. I don't care. I'm just here to tell you that there are people that do this and there are things and ways of thinking about our job that might be helpful, and that's what this whole thing has been about and continues to be about in my brain. How do we help the people who are out there doing the work? Because the work matters and we need to keep people in it in the game, and if we can't fix the system yet, how do we stay in the game? And Scott has got some great ideas about that. So thanks, scott, and we shall indeed talk more about this and some other stuff in the months ahead.
Speaker 2:I would love that. Thank you, mel, and thank you for everything you do.
